German police are investigating after several people were killed in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness center in Hamburg.
Armed police officers near the scene of a shooting in Hamburg, Germany on Thursday March 9, 2023 after one or more people opened fire in a church. The Hamburg city government says the shooting took place in the Gross Borstel district on Thursday evening. (Jonas Walzberg/dpa via AP)
On Friday, German police were looking into a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness center in Hamburg that killed several people, with the gunman believed to be among them.
Police have not released a death toll, but multiple local media outlets reported that the shooting on Thursday evening killed seven people and seriously injured eight others.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned the “brutal act of violence” and expressed his condolences to the victims and their families.
The association of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany said it was “deeply saddened by the horrific attack on its members” following a religious service at the Kingdom Hall in Hamburg.
The first 911 calls were made around 2015 GMT after shots were fired at the building in the city’s northern district of Gross Borstel, according to a police spokesman on the scene.
According to police, “several people were seriously injured, some fatally” in the incident.
“At this time, there is no reliable information on the crime’s motive,” police said, urging people not to speculate.
An “extreme danger” alert was issued in the area using a disaster warning app, but it was lifted shortly after 3:00 a.m. local time by Germany’s Federal Office for Civil Protection.
“The police measures in the surrounding area are gradually being discontinued,” Hamburg police tweeted early Friday. The investigation into the crime’s background is ongoing.”
On Twitter, the mayor of the port city, Peter Tschentscher, expressed his shock at the shooting.
At midday, Hamburg police will hold a press conference.
They have asked witnesses to come forward and upload any photos or videos to a special website.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said investigators were “working flat out” to figure out what caused the attack.
The attack occurred at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall building, a nondescript three-story structure where members had gathered for a religious service.
There are approximately 175,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany, including 3,800 in Hamburg, a US Christian movement founded in the late 1800s that preaches nonviolence and is known for door-to-door evangelism.
According to police, the first officers on the scene discovered several lifeless bodies and seriously injured people.
The fire department was attending to 17 uninjured people who had attended the event, according to the Hamburger Abendblatt.
According to police, officers heard a shot in the “upper part of the building” before discovering a body in the area where it rang out.
“We have no indications of a fleeing perpetrator,” a police spokesman said.
The uncovered person in the upper part of the building was “possibly” the attacker, according to the spokesman.
Hamburg police said in a tweet early Friday that they assumed the body found belonged to the perpetrator.
-Being Attacked –
In recent years, Germany has been rocked by several attacks, both by jihadists and far-right extremists.
A truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 was among the deadliest acts committed by Islamist extremists, killing 12 people.
The Tunisian attacker, a failed asylum seeker, supported the jihadist group Islamic State.
Because of its participation in the anti-Islamic State coalition in Iraq and Syria, Europe’s most populous nation remains a target for jihadist groups.
According to interior ministry data, the number of Islamists considered dangerous in the country more than doubled between 2013 and 2021, reaching 615.
However, several far-right attacks have occurred in Germany in recent years, prompting accusations that the government is not doing enough to combat neo-Nazi violence.
A far-right extremist killed ten people and injured five others in the central German city of Hanau in February 2020.
On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in 2019, a neo-Nazi attempted to storm a synagogue in Halle, killing two people.
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